Ordinary Heroes

The current research in psychology suggests that there are three types of heroes in the world. Any gamer will tell you that this seems like an under-estimation, but what the heck, isn't it nice to know somebody's getting paid to think about this sort of thing?

The current research in psychology suggests that there are three types of heroes in the world. Any gamer will tell you that this seems like an under-estimation, but what the heck, isn't it nice to know somebody's getting paid to think about this sort of thing?

Heroism is a hard thing to quantify and qualify. In some ways, villainy is much easier for a scientist to study, both because it's very prevalent and because it's attention-grabbing. There's no shortage of criminals and monsters in the world, and many (though by no means a majority) are safely locked up in places that make it easy to study them. In contrast, heroes are a lot harder to study. Unlike in medieval fantasy, where heroes are bastions of light whose reputations span nations and whose oversize weapons, glow-in-the-dark familiars, and troupes of followers may be visible for miles, in our world, heroes tend to be ordinary, anonymous people who shun fame (or more commonly, aren't considered interesting enough by the local news to merit fame). None then less, there are real heroes out there, many of whom are just as noble and awe-inspiring as any character we'd create, and there has been a bit of research on them. Much of this research is in the psychological literature, rather than the medical, and to my knowledge, for example, nobody has ever isolated any genes which seem to be associated with heroism the way they have with criminality. When we study real-world heroes, the question is often a simple one: why do they do what they do?

A few years back, a Canadian team wrote a paper on this exact topic. Although it's been just over four years since the paper was published, it's still one of the most recent studies of the subject (as opposed to the study of evil and criminality, which has been looked at in at least 50 published papers since January 2014). The idea of the study was to find living heroes -- I'll explain how they defined "hero" -- and consider 1) whether heroism is part of their character, or more a function of being placed into a situation which forced one to be heroic, and 2) whether there are different personality styles that predispose people to heroic action.

The authors began by finding 50 "moral exemplars," and they did so by contacting people who had been awarded a national Canadian honour for moral acts. They found 50 participants, half of whom had been awarded medals for bravery -- civilians who risked their lives to save others -- and half of whom had been awarded for long-term volunteering or similar humanitarian causes. Right way, we can see a difference between the two; "brave" heroes might have performed only a single moment's heroism, whereas "caring" heroes had been recognized for extensive work. Their sample included 31 men and 19 women (a ratio which I note with some amusement isn't far off from the relative proportion of male and female gamers), were predominantly white (I think we can safely attribute this to socio-cultural factors and the process by which people are nominated for these medals more than anything else), and had an average 14 years of education. There were no gender differences between the brave heroes and the caring heroes. These participants were compared with a control group recruited from the general community. Every participant completed some personality questionnaires and then underwent a 2-hour face-to-face interview where they told their life story, talked about some crucial life events how they coped with some moral dilemmas, and answered questions designed to get at their "epistemic development," a complex construct including how people understand knowledge, morality, and social awareness. I won't get into how the authors coded and analyzed the data, in part because it's complex and in part because I don't entirely agree with the way they went about doing it, but let's just say it was "adequate."

To give a very superficial summary of their findings, the authors identified three clusters of personality traits which distinguished the moral exemplars from the regular participants. They referred to these clusters as the communal, the deliberative, and the ordinary, but for our purposes, we can somewhat vulgarly think of this as three types of heroic character types.  The communal hero is one who thinks strongly in terms of social interdependence, relational goals, and nurturance of others. The communal hero understands life stories in terms of high-level moral reasoning -- meaning they spend a lot of energy thinking about the morality of their actions -- and in terms of the theme of redemption. The deliberative hero is one who is preoccupied by independent growth, thoughtful action, sophisticated reasoning, self-development, and openness to experience. These heroes seem to rely on principles and self-understanding to drive them to moral action, and they tend to be able to see multiple sides of the same story. The ordinary hero were "commonplace" in their personality and didn't tend to differentiate from the control participants, except for being stronger believers in the principle of redemption. These are the heroes who may not be exceptional in character, but find that life puts them in the position of doing the right thing. As the authors put it, for these individuals, " moral heroism is fundamentally banal." Indeed, the ordinary hero tends not to even see their actions as heroic. As the authors quote one of their participants, "...it wasn’t a matter of expecting to be thanked... But he was another human being and if there was a chance of helping him, then, you know, what the heck, why not? That was really it... when something like that happens, you run and grab things as quick as you can." Two thirds of the people who had been awarded for bravery were ordinary heroes; it may be that the communal and deliberative hero are perhaps better at doing the right thing quietly, over long periods of time (what the authors call a "moral career"), while the ordinary hero is better built for the single exceptional moment of moral action.

We can make a lot of inferences about our own characters (in both senses of the word) from all of this. Each hero type described naturally suggests certain PC classes or archetypes. In the paper, for example, the authors give an example of one of their communal exemplars, a particularly empathic nurse. The deliberative hero sounds more like a monk, or perhaps a character more strongly oriented towards the Neutral alignment. The authors gave this quote from one of their deliberative exemplars: " I have no idea whether my principles are better than yours, or comparable to them, or whatever. What I do know is that I can live with those principles and that they, more often than not, give me an answer that, when I look at it much later, I still like." As enthusiasts of fiction, of course, we see some notable subtypes of hero missing from the discussion, and that's probably largely because of how they picked their heroes. The Conan-style barbarian wouldn't have been included in this study, because such brutal, self-interested heroes are unlikely to be nominated by their neighbours for an award. A character such as this, while possibly equally heroic in many respects, probably wouldn't endorse the theme of redemption as much as the three types discussed above. Similarly, the roguish, trickster hero probably wouldn't have shown up in this study, but would likely have had a very different approach in terms of the narrative of their life and their approach to moral reasoning.

The most important finding of this study is that heroism seems not to be a "one size fits all" sort of construct. To us, who have pretty broad definitions of the word "hero," this probably seems obvious, but among philosophers and social scientists, moral heroism has long been seen as a relatively one-dimensional thing, and this shows that the more complex conceptualization is probably more accurate. In essence, the study shows us that people become heroes for a lot of different reasons, but that the majority of people become heroes for the same core reason: when under pressure, heroes are people, often boring and ordinary people, who do the right thing because they feel it's the only real choice. 

More than four years ago, Dr. Eris Lis, M.D., began writing a series of brilliant and informative posts on RPGs through the eyes of a medical professional, and this is the one that appeared here on June 8, 2014. Lis is a physician, gamer, and author of the Skirmisher Publishing LLC OGL sourcebook Insults & Injuries, which is also available for the Pathfinder RPG system.